The goal is to provide highly qualified teachers to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse pool of students. The question is how to do that. Although there have been a number of variations in the path to a career in teaching, only a few paths typically exist at any point in time. The traditional route finds high school graduates attending four…

Technology has long been employed to improve teaching and learning, although not always so efficiently and cleverly as one might wish. Advances in the teaching paradigm have sometimes reinforced outmoded, obsolete, and simply incorrect practices and prevailing understanding of the organization of knowledge. Today, technology presents education in…

In this article, the author addresses the challenge to teacher education programs to resist swings in the pendulum and help new teachers sustain progressive, responsive, school-based reform efforts that seek to address the unique needs of every student even as external demands for standardized measurements of learning remain firmly in place in the…

The author, a programme leader for a Post Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGCLTHE), hears a complaint from her colleagues that undergraduate students require "spoon-feeding". Accepting structuralism's argument that language does things, not just describe them, the author examines "spoon-feeding" in more depth.…

Traditional education, employing lectures or telecommunicative instruction methods, has been very effective in providing topical facts. However, the development of student skills and thinking ability require higher levels of instruction and more opportunity to practice and apply acquired knowledge. As students progress through a particular…

In this article, the authors call for an end to an approach to teaching which makes a nonsense of pupils' learning of mathematics. They decry the over-regulation of instruction techniques based on Ofsted inspections, showing how much class time may be lost to prescribed events like warm-ups and lesson recaps. To illustrate their assertion, they…

Describes characteristics of distance education which promote lifelong learning, and introduces criteria for promoting lifelong learning in traditional university instructional settings. Topics discussed include the role of distance learning in higher education, teaching methods and learning strategies for both types of instruction, and Faure's…

This paper compares the content of two types of instruction presented to a student either by an intelligent tutoring system or by some conventional text, such as a textbook or a computer user's manual, when the educational goal is skills learning. Two distinct points of view are presented: (1) that of the "expounders," who believe that…

Suggests a practical approach for coping with training students in laboratory skill through the use of videotaped (VTR) materials and discusses the technical advantages of using VTR as opposed to laboratory research. Six references are provided. (MER)

A review of computer assisted instruction research and recent meta-analytical reports suggests that all research on the learning benefits of the instructional uses of computers should be halted until there is a plausible reason to expect that computers are instrumental in learning, since all existing evidence indicates that computers do not yield…

Results of exploratory investigation indicate that failures to communicate management information systems (MIS) concepts can result from the sender's communication style being inappropriate to the receiver's cognitive type. Details of the research methodology, analysis of variance, and summary of results are given, as well as recommendations for…

Children starting school today have already been trained to learn by television, and the skills they have developed may not be suitable for the print-oriented learning required in school. Differences in learning from electronic sources and from books are discussed, as are strategies teachers can use to help children adjust. (PP)

Discusses some advantages of using workbooks in programs of basic instruction in academic libraries, and compares the use of workbooks with the effectiveness of audiovisual instruction, group instruction, lectures, and library tours to present the same material. Twenty references are listed. (Author/CHC)

Claims that computers and other high technology can replace teachers and staff, thereby reducing educational costs, are unwarranted for several reasons. First, most cost analyses focus on hardware costs, which are not the major factor directing the cost of computer assisted instruction (CAI). Second, technology is more likely to change the skill…

Since 1978, the University of Victoria has offered courses to students in British Columbia, using an interactive satellite delivery system. During that time both the system and the course design have become more sophisticated. Principles underlying program design include focusing on the learner and communication with learners, and basing televised…